Patel row puts focus on dual role of PM in ministerial code
THE chairman of the Committee on Standards in Public Life has questioned whether the Prime Minister should be allowed to rule on complaints about the behaviour of his own ministers in the wake of the Priti Patel controversy.
Lord Evans of Weardale told MPS the way the ministerial code works might be seen as “marking your own homework” because the Prime Minister currently has both “sole discretion” over triggering investigations and on what action to take.
Speaking to the Commons standards committee Lord Evans, a former head of MI5, said yesterday: “I think there is a question to be asked as to whether there should be more independence, as to whether the investigative elements should be triggered independently, potentially. And then there is also the separate, but parallel, issue as to what the actual response to the investigations should be.”
Afew weeks ago, when Angela Rayner called a Conservative MP “scum” in the Commons, something very strange happened. Nothing. True, Labour’s deputy leader earned a thunderous rebuke from Dame Eleanor Laing in the Speaker’s chair. “We will not have remarks like that – not under any circumstances,” Laing bristled. Under pressure from aghast Tories, Rayner issued an apology. “I apologise for the language that I used in a heated debate in Parliament earlier,” she said unapologetically.
And that was that. No deluge of comments on social media about what a b---- Rayner was. No #angelamustgo. No reporters furrowing their brows on the evening news and asking why such a foul-mouthed person should continue to occupy a senior role.
Make no mistake, the reason so little fuss was made about Rayner’s offensive behaviour is because she’s of the Left. And it is one of the universe’s stranger moral laws that the Left are always virtuous even when they’re being vile.
Increasingly, the Leftists who dominate our institutions get to define what constitutes offensive behaviour, then they come up with a new “ism” to describe that behaviour (racism, sexism, Conservatism), the better to use as a cosh on anyone who dares challenge them.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? In the days since, a report by Sir Alex Allan found Priti Patel guilty of breaking the ministerial code after she shouted and swore at civil servants.
I haven’t spoken to a single person who believes the Home Secretary’s conduct was “bullying”. Outside bien pensant circles and TV studios, people seem to think it’s far more likely she came up against a bunch of white male snobs who seemed averse to actual work and accountability.
“Wish they’d leave her to carry out her deportations in peace,” sighed one farmer. (That has to be my favourite remark of the week, if not the year.)
It does beggar belief that a woman who is barely more than 5ft tall managed to terrorise all those 6ft 3in public school mandarins. “Is this Boudica, Sir Alex Allan is describing?” asked one entrepreneur who emailed me. “I don’t think so. Just a woman trying to do her job amongst a bunch of white mice who have not been up to pace for a very long time.”
What the scandal reveals is that the term bullying has been stretched like silly putty until it has come to mean: “Someone said something to me which I didn’t much like.” For those of us who entered the world of work when a flying typewriter aimed at your right ear was considered a perfectly acceptable rebuke for a rookie error, such snowflakery seems utterly pathetic and actually rather sad.
A colleague recalls the editor of a provincial paper standing on a chair and yelling at the assembled newsroom: “If I asked reception to be put through to ‘w-----’, all your phones would ring.” Ah, happy days!
In his report, which was far less condemnatory than the headlines, Sir Alex said she “has become – justifiably in many instances – frustrated by the Home Office leadership’s lack of responsiveness… The evidence is that this has manifested itself in forceful expression, including some occasions of shouting and swearing. This may not be done intentionally to cause upset, but that has been the effect on some individuals.”
Did it really make civil servants feel “uncomfortable, frightened, less respected”, which meets the Civil Service definition of “bullying”, or was it “legitimate, reasonable and constructive criticism”, which doesn’t?
The whole thing is alarmingly subjective. If, say, you have a department which doesn’t much like your policies – be they leaving the EU or cracking down on illegal immigration – what is there to stop civil servants thwarting those policies through sly intransigence and then crying foul when the minister stamps her foot and insists you do as she asks?
The Home Office has form when it comes to undermining its boss. Back in 2006, John Reid, the Labour home secretary, complained the department was “not fit for purpose”. Twelve years later, a report concluded Amber Rudd, who resigned after inadvertently misleading MPS over Windrush, had been let down by officials who “gave her the wrong information and later failed to clear up the problem”.
It seems poor Priti can’t win. The Prime Minister quite rightly circled the wagons this week to protect her.
Now, however, there are rumours she could lose her job in the next reshuffle because of her repeated failure to get a grip on the flow of migrants across the Channel.
So, if you take a hard line with your staff because they are failing to act quickly to stop illegal migration, then you’re a bully. But, if you don’t stop the boats, you get fired, which means the arrogant forces of institutional inertia have claimed the scalp of yet another home secretary. Yesterday, the BBC published this year’s 100 Women list of influential women from across the globe. It features the usual politically correct line-up, but there is no room for the first Asian woman from a working-class background to occupy one of the great British offices of state. Of course not.
Ms Patel could have been an icon not a demon, if only she weren’t the wrong kind of brown person.
It is greatly to her credit that she has played neither the race nor the gender card. If a Labour politician were facing the same allegations, you can bet there would be uproar that a woman of colour was being victimised.
Before Boris moves to demote “the Prittster” I hope he remembers that the Conservatives won a landslide victory last December precisely because the majority of Britons want what Priti Patel wants.
If she gets ejected from the Home Office, it’s not just a courageous female that is demoted. It’s democracy itself.
Ms Patel could have been an icon, not a demon, if only she weren’t the ‘wrong kind’ of brown person